I was married in Ventnor. At least so I gather from the local newspapers,
in whose visitors' lists there figures the entry, "Mr. and Mrs.
Zangwill." I do not care to correct it, because, the lady being my
mother, it is perfectly accurate and leads to charming misconceptions.
"There, that's he," loudly whispered a young man, nudging his sweetheart,
"and there's his wife with him." "That! why, she looks old enough to be
his mother," replied the young lady. "Ah!" said her lover, with an air of
conscious virtue and a better bargain, "they're awfully mercenary, these
literary chaps." The reverse of this happened to a young friend of mine.
He married an old lady who possessed a very large fortune. During the
honeymoon his solicitous attentions to her excited the admiration of
another old lady, who passed her life in a Bath-chair. "Dear me!" she
thought: "how delightful in these degenerate days to see a young man so
attentive to his mother!" and, dying soon after, left him another large
fortune.
SOMEWHERE ELSE
Before I chanced on the great discovery which has made all my holidays
real boons, and pleasure trips quite a pleasure, I used to go through all
the horrors of preliminary indecision, which are still, alas! the lot of
the vast majority. I would travel for weeks in Bradshaw, and end by
sticking a pin at random between the leaves as if it were a Bible, vowing
to go where destiny pointed. Once the pin stuck at London, and so I had
to stick there too, and was defrauded of my holiday. But even when the
pin sent me to Putney, or Coventry, I was invariably disappointed. Like
the inquisitive and precocious infant of the poem, I was always asking
for the address of Peace, but whenever I called I was told that she was
not in, while the mocking refrain seemed to ring in my ears: "Not there,
not there, my child." And at last I asked angrily of the rocks and caves:
"Will no one tell me where Peace may be found? Wherever I go I find she
is somewhere else." Then, at last, one nymph's soft heart grew tender and
pitiful towards me, and Echo, hardly waiting till I had completed my
sentence, answered: "Somewhere Else."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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